


Bridging the Gap

by expectopatronuts



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Hate to Love, Non-binary!Moira, Pre-Relationship, i just had to include that headcanon in there bc it's my fav, just a little christmasy one shot because tis the season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 12:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13146519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/expectopatronuts/pseuds/expectopatronuts
Summary: She wasn’t sure why she was doing it. The truth was, O’Deorain and her didn’t get along well and they probably never would. Their differences were simply too many, and those were the facts.And yet, Angela had been looking for her for the past hour, asking everybody attending the Overwatch Christmas party whether they had seen her.





	Bridging the Gap

She wasn’t sure why she was doing it. The truth was, O’Deorain and her didn’t get along well and probably never would. Their differences were simply too many, and those were the facts.

And yet, Angela had been looking for her for the past hour, asking everybody attending the Overwatch Christmas party whether they had seen her. It turned out that a two-meter-tall redheaded woman was harder to spot than one would originally have thought.

Angela had almost given up when, in a stroke of inspiration, she decided to open the door to laboratory 2A.

There, sitting in the dark, was O’Deorain’s lanky figure. As Angela flicked the switch, she shielded her eyes against the light with one hand.

“Hullo, Ziegler,” she said, her voice slightly slurred. “Come to tell me off for drinking in the lab?”

It was only then that Angela noticed the almost-empty glass in front of her and the half-finished bottle.

“No, I—”

“Come, then,” O’Deorain interrupted, beckoning to the stool opposite her. “Have a drink with me. It’s Irish whiskey,” she added with a conspiratorial grin.

Angela hesitated for a second, wondering just how drunk the other woman had to be to invite her, Saint Mercy, as O’Deorain liked to call her, to drink Irish whiskey. Then she decided that she could in fact use another drink—liquid courage, as her father used to say—and she sat down on the stool as O’Deorain poured a generous dose into the glass, pulled a plastic cup out of somewhere and filled that too.

“Here,” she said, pushing the glass towards Angela. “What do you want to toast to?” she asked, raising her glass. “Never mind, knowing you, we might as well begin with world peace.”

There it was. The sarcasm that O’Deorain seemed to have in endless stores and which she didn’t hesitate in using against Angela at every possible chance. Apparently, the alcohol hadn’t dulled her edges.

Angela frowned a little, then made a conscious effort to smile and raised her glass, meeting O’Deorain’s eyes as she did so. They were less clear than usual, but clear enough that Angela could see the slight mockery in them.

“It’s a good thing to toast to,” she said, right before taking a sip.

The whiskey burned her throat as it went down, and it added to the warmth of all the alcohol McCree and Reyes had already pushed into her at the party on the grounds that she ‘needed to have some fun’.

“Good, isn’t it?” O’Deorain said as she put down her glass, smacking her lips. Angela saw that her ‘sip’ had been more than half the cup.

They didn’t speak much and, for once, the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It wasn’t filled with dismissive _tsks_ or accusatory _hmms_ or any of the other noises that could be heard in laboratory 2A on a regular work day.

In the time that it took Angela to finish her drink, O’Deorain refilled her own cup twice more. Both times, she raised her glass, and toasted first to Rosalind Franklin and then to Chien-Shiung Wu. Just what was going through her head escaped Angela entirely, but she had no objection to either toast.

“You have to do right by them, Ziegler,” O’Deorain said as she finished her third drink. She leaned forward a little. “You’re womanhood’s chance at true recognition.”

Angela finished her drink and shook her head.

“No. No, no,” she said. Her tongue felt slow in her mouth. “We have you too,” she said earnestly.

She had no idea where those words came from. Normally, she took a moderate amount of pleasure in disproving O’Deorain’s papers as thoroughly as possible, in shutting her down ruthlessly in conferences and panels, telling herself that she was doing it to preserve science from mediocrity. But now, with the whiskey warming her inside and making her face numb, she couldn’t tell herself that she did it because O’Deorain’s work was subpar. No, it wasn’t that she wasn’t good—she was _bleeding deadly_ , as she herself would have put it—it was that she was _wrong_. And it bothered Angela, though she couldn’t yet put her finger on the reason why.

O’Deorain just smiled slightly.

“That’s sweet of you to say,” she said, and it sounded like she meant it. _Mann_ , she must be truly pissed, Angela thought. “But you know I’m out of the game. Unethical research and all that stuff you like to throw in my face.” She spread her hands. “Also, I’m not a woman.”

Angela looked at her and felt her face flushing. _Mann_ , she must be truly pissed as well, if she had just made a social _faux pas_ that probably nobody had committed since 2020.

“Oh. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

O’Deorain waved it aside. “It’s alright. You didn’t know,” she said simply. “But you _will_ get a Nobel prize, you know that, right?” She said it with such an absolute conviction that Angela found it hard not to believe her. “You have to.”

Angela nodded seriously. Maybe it was that second glass of whiskey, but she felt more than capable of carrying the weight of that mission. Which meant, it was probably time to stop drinking.

O’Deorain held the bottle up and swirled the contents.

“I think we should drink to Scotland,” she said suddenly, reaching for Angela’s glass.

Clumsily, Angela reached across the table and stopped her hand. It felt cold, much colder than hers, and she let go almost immediately, suddenly feeling very warm in the face.

“I don’t think we should,” she said. “Besides, aren’t you Irish?”

“So?” O’Deorain said, but she set the bottle back down. “Scotland’s a beautiful country and it deserves a toast.”

“I’m sure,” Angela said. “But maybe some other time.”

O’Deorain made a face. “I thought you’d come her to drink with your esteemed arch-enemy,” she said. “Not to ruin my fun.”

“You’re not my arch-enemy,” Angela protested. “More like my—I don’t know, rival, maybe. Though we could just say colleagues and leave it at that,” she added with a small smile.

“We could,” O’Deorain said thoughtfully. “But that would mean the conferences would be twice as boring.”

Angela shook her head and decided to ignore that last comment.

“And I didn’t come to ruin your fun,” she said. “I came to give you your present.”

“What, as a peace offering, like?” O’Deorain laughed.

Angela blushed a little. “Something like that, yes,” she said, taking the package out of her bag.

She set it down on the table, and for a second she was afraid that O’Deorain was going to burst into laughter and tell her that she just couldn’t get any stupider. But O’Deorain merely reached for the flat box and weighted it in her hand.

“You must be really committed to bridging the gap,” she commented, turning the wrapped package this way and that, as though trying to guess what it was.

“Just open it already,” Angela said, resisting the urge to drum her fingers on the table impatiently as O’Deorain shook the box next to her ear to check if it rattled.

“All in good time,” O’Deorain said, turning the box over again. “I would have expected a book, but it’s much too light for that,” she said. “It’s not, is it?”

“Yes, it is. It’s the _Medical Ethics Primer_ ,” Angela said with a small mocking smile.

O’Deorain raised her eyebrows.

“Disgusting,” she said, with an exaggerated shudder. “I seriously hope that’s not it, Ziegler, for your own sake.”

Then, finally, she tore the paper and opened the box. Angela watched the corners of her mouth turn down as she tried to repress a smile and she felt a warmth spreading though her chest that had nothing to do with the whiskey.

O’Deorain took the tie out of the box and held it out—navy blue, with a pattern of little silver DNA helixes at regular intervals. Without a word, she took off the burgundy tie she was currently wearing and knotted the new one around her neck with practiced ease.

“Almost makes me feel like a real scientist,” O’Deorain said with a small smirk. “Thank you,” she said then, and the smirk morphed into a smile.

Angela smiled back. For a second, neither of them spoke.

Then O’Deorain got up and Angela followed suit. She stumbled slightly and had to lean on the table for support.

“I have a gift for you too,” O’Deorain said, taking a small step forward.

Before Angela could determine whether she was joking or not (it certainly did not look like she had a gift), O’Deorain leant forward a little and brushed her lips to hers.

It lasted no more than a second. Then O’Deorain straightened back up, readjusted the knot of her tie slightly and walked over to the door.

“Merry Christmas, Ziegler.”

O’Deorain flicked the light switch on the way out, and Angela was left standing in the half-light that came from the hallway, wondering why a dazed grin was slowly spreading across her face.

·◊◊◊·

fin

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't know who Chien-Shiung Wu and Rosalind Franklin are, just google them and prepare to be outraged at the discrimination of women in academia.
> 
> oh, and merry christmas/happy monday, everyone!


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